Aorist
Aorist (from Greek αοριστος, indefinite or unlimited) is a term used in certain
Indo-European languages to refer to a particular
grammatical tense and/or
aspect. It is used to denote action in the past, but is distinguished from the
imperfect and
perfect; it is similar to the
preterite in languages such as
Spanish.
There is some confusion over whether the aorist is a tense or an aspect. This reflects the double nature of the aorist in
Ancient Greek, the most well-known language with an aorist. In the indicative, the Ancient Greek aorist represents a combination of tense and aspect:
past tense,
perfective aspect. In other moods (subjunctive, optative and imperative), however, as well as in the infinitive and (largely) the participle, the aorist is purely aspectual, with no reference to any particular tense.
Modern Greek has inherited the same system.
In
Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the aorist was originally just an aspect, but by late PIE it had probably already developed into a combination of tense and aspect just as in Ancient Greek, since the same system is represented in
Sanskrit.
In
Latin,
Greek, and
Sanskrit, the aorist is marked by several morphological devices, but three stand out as most common.
The s-aorist
The first is the s-aorist, so called because an 's' is inserted between the root and the personal ending. In Latin, for example,
dico means "I say", while
dixi (from
dic-s-i) means "I said"; in Greek,
ακουω akouō means "I hear", while
ηκουσα "kousa means "I heard." (Grammatical note: the first letter of
ηκουσα is an eta, and not an alpha, because of a Greek verbal
augment that marks the past indicative tense.) In Greek, this is called the
first aorist, or the
weak aorist.
Ablaut
The aorist's second marker is a change in vowel grade, a process known as
ablaut. Indo-European made great use of ablaut to express semantic changes morphologically, in fact, English uses ablaut abundantly, creating such verb forms as: swim, swam, swum; come, came, come; and take, took, taken. English further uses ablaut in extended forms, such as: sit, seat, sat, set (etymologically, to set is to cause to sit); lie, lay, lain, laid, layer; and sing, sang, sung, song. In Latin, ablaut was a common marker of the aorist, for example:
capiō "I take"; but
c"pī "I took"; and Greek
λειπω leipō "I leave", but
ελιπον elipon "I left". In Greek, this is called the
second aorist or the
strong aorist.
Reduplication
The third marker of the aorist is reduplication. While a
reduplication is more commonly associated with the morphology of the perfect, there are sporadic verbs which use it in the aorist. The reduplicated aorist is more common in
Sanskrit than in other Indo-European languages, but an example in Greek is the verb
αγω agō "I lead", which has the aorist
ηγαγον "gagon "I led". (Grammatical note: the first letter of
ηγαγον is an eta, and not an alpha, because of a Greek verbal
augment that marks the past indicative tense.)
*
*
Grammatical aspect*
Grammatical tense*
imperfective aspect*
perfective aspect
